Deseret , livre ebook

D eseret: A D efense and a R efuge
Jeffery W. Olsen
Austin Macauley Publishers
2023-01-06
Deseret: A Defense and a Refuge About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Chapter 63 Chapter 64 Chapter 65 Chapter 66 Chapter 67 Chapter 68 Chapter 69 Chapter 70 Chapter 71 Chapter 72 Appendix
About the Author
Jeffery W. Olsen was born in 1954 in Salt Lake City, has six siblings, and enjoys a rich and varied heritage. After a botched Ulpanim trip to Israel in 1972, underestimating the effects of the Munich Olympics, he served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for two years in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He returned home and married Sylvia Lee Rost, a native of Nevada, in 1976, and they are the parents of five children. Most of his life has been spent in western Nevada, where he graduated from UNR, then at times ranged through the deserts and mountains, the benefactor of celestial tolerance and erudition.
Dedication
Dedicated to Barbara June Jackson, Kenneth Lee Rost, Maxwell Bernard Olsen Jr., and Elma Marie Anderson, the ultimate in parenting and inclusion.
This book is also dedicated to our dear friends, Brent and Joyce Wadsworth, who have blessed our relationship with inspiration, instruction, and joy.
Copyright Information ©
Jeffery W. Olsen 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Ordering Information
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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Olsen, Jeffery W.
Deseret: A Defense and a Refuge
ISBN 9781685621940 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781685621957 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781685621964 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022918238
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published 2023
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
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Preface
“… that the gathering together…may be for a defense and a refuge from the storm …” Doctrine and Covenants
“Deseret,” the feisty 52-year-old Dr. John Bernhisel muttered as he stepped back from the heavily curtained window in his congressional Washington DC office. The rains were miserable and cold in the middle of March. Low clouds darkened the landscape, bringing on an early evening. A heavy sigh helped the man reorient himself. He lit a lantern, raising the wick high enough to give off the maximum light. Whale oil worked well enough but it gave off an unpleasant odor. Coal oil seemed better, at least easier to obtain but caused a lot of smoke, making its use primarily out of doors.
Continuing to shake his head, he dropped into the leather padded chair before his dark wooden desk. The hardwood was ornately carved. Looking over the disorganized pile of papers before him, he collected and shuffled, then pushed them to one side. It was then that he saw the old map, half-covered by legal correspondence. Drawing it out, he unfolded and gazed upon the fading drawings.
The map was 100 years old and of Spanish origin. The edges were worn and tattered and the ink drawings and writings were dimming. His fingers traced to the left and the mountain symbols so carefully copied by an old, foreign cartographer. He decided that it was a real work of art, if not drawn to scale. Someone, years ago, had attempted to map a distant and isolated area of the continent. He did it confidently, believing it could guide future explorers and even protect them.
The map had been given to Bernhisel by Almon Babbitt, a compatriot politician from the newly formed Utah Territory, only days before. The well-traveled man had a knack for obtaining information. That was one of the things that made him so valuable. Babbitt had received the document from Judge William Drummond. Brigham Young had aggressively pushed his representatives in the nation’s capital to get the application into Congress for the organization and formation of the State of Deseret when the 1850 Compromise was being solidified the previous September. A brief window had been opened on the legislative floor when the clever, and some suggested, subversive, Mormon leader was hoping to take advantage of bypassing the territory stage of the country’s growth and move straight to statehood. The plan didn’t work. It was California that was granted statehood. New Mexico and Utah were both given territory status.
The Mormon contingent was curious as to why their petition for the territory being called Deseret was denied and instead switched to an unknown name: Utah. The Mormons had never heard of the title. One crusty Congressman finally snapped after considering their pestering questions as a form of badgering. “Because the damned word, Deseret, isn’t in the dictionary!” he hollered. “That’s why! And don’t bother us about it anymore!” the man huffed angrily. “Brigham doesn’t run a fiefdom! He can’t conjure up any word he wants and expect the Congress of the United States to kowtow to his wishes! We have our ethics. And when it comes down to it, we have the clout!”
It seemed to be the demise of Deseret. “Or, maybe not,” the doctor mumbled to himself.
It was a little piece of the puzzle for the balding Dr. Bernhisel. The rag-tag Mormon refugees living for the past three years in the Great Basin were well aware that their ideas were not embraced by most of the citizens of the country. They felt that the name of Deseret was a small request. It also signaled a connection with their Book of Mormon. It reminded one and all that there was still a substantial difference existing between them, known as Gentiles, and the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and God, couched in the doctrines proclaimed by this text, a book the adherents claimed was a companion scripture to the Bible. This belief had infuriated their unbelieving neighbors since the publication of the book in 1830.
The sect’s history had been wracked with misunderstanding and violence. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known informally and derisively as Mormons, had finally been driven from Nauvoo, Illinois, on the shores of the Mississippi, and the confines of the United States in 1846. The outcasts fled west into Mexican territory, into the Rocky Mountains and beyond, into the valleys of the Great Basin, where they found a modicum of peace and began farming, and building. New colonies were sprouting monthly. Redress of their constitutional rights denied them as citizens of the fledgling republic, the United States of America, was never considered by the politicians. These same representatives felt overburdened by the acquisition of more land after the war with Mexico, as well as with the deep and divisive principle of slavery.
This occurrence didn’t take place in a vacuum. War with Mexico was imminent in 1846 as the Mormons poised to set off on their westward trek. That summer the government of the United States drafted, then scooped up a Mormon battalion, consisting of 500 of their strongest young men from the ranks of the downtrodden Saints, to fight in the war. After mustering at Fort Leavenworth in August, the infantry marched 1900 miles across the deserts of the southwest, arriving in San Diego in January 1847, all without needing to fire a single shot in anger. Five months later, the battalion was discharged.
The men worked their way north to Sacramento in preparation for the crossing of the mighty Sierra Nevadas and making their way eastward to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, where Brigham Young had stopped the westward migration of their families. While working in anticipation for their upcoming trip, Battalion member, Henry Bigler, noted in his diary that gold was discovered near Sutter’s Mill on 24 January 1848, which news was soon trumpeted in the national press, causing the tremendous California Gold Rush, changing the face of the relatively new country. The men of the Mormon Battalion crossed the towering Sierra Nevadas and then the wide Great Basin, joining their new desert home with a welcome $17,000 in gold for their destitute families and friends.
It was a detail that was not lost on the weary Dr. Bernhisel. He had watched it unfold before his eyes. Brigham Young had promised his tired, worn followers that if they would be patient, the Lord would come to their aid. An abundance of food and resources would soon be coming their way. Prices of these life-pr